Henry Parks

Ongoing modeling of chronic wasting disease in whitetail deer in the Midwest predicts pathogen spread through the Twin Cities Metro Area. Yet, little is known about how deer utilize habitat in this area. To lend predictive power for future pathogen network models, we attempted to identify the covariates that best predicted habitat selection. To describe how deer use habitat in the TCMA, we utilize data from collared deer from Elm Creek Park and calculated the selection of different cover types within home ranges. We calculated important covariates within deer home ranges and buffered circles of fixed radii around home range centroids and random points on the landscape. Finally, we fit a resource selection function utilizing landscape covariates and extrapolated the model across the TCMA. We found that deer consistently selected for forested, open, and wetland cover types in proportion to their availability on the landscape. At increasing spatial scales, circles buffered around home range centroids had consistently more forest, wetland, upland, and higher mean habitat suitability index scores, while random circles had more developed areas. The resource selection function found that deer select habitat primarily based on avoidance of developed areas and roads. Deer primarily select their habitat and home ranges as an emergent property of their avoiding developed areas which informs the future direction of modeling efforts that attempt to use networks to model disease spread through the TCMA.